0:00Skip to 0 minutes and 0 secondsPGD in the UK is strictly regulated. It can only be carried out in a licenced clinic if the clinic has a licence to carry out PGD for the particular condition and it can only be done in order to avoid serious disease. So, in the UK it is not lawful to use PGD for reasons of gender selection unless there is a serious sexing condition for which PGD is being used. So, very strictly regulated here and you couldn’t do it to screen in desirable characteristics, even if that was genetically possible and you couldn’t do it just because you had a preference not to have a child of a particular sex. So here it is strictly regulated.

0:36Skip to 0 minutes and 36 secondsObviously it is possible for people to go overseas, in particular to the United States or possibly Greece, for gender selection. And we don’t know how many people are doing that. One has to imagine that it is quite, a small number of people that actually care that much about the sex of their child that they are willing to spend £20,000 for example choosing their child. Most people just want to have a healthy baby and they don’t want to undergo IVF and PGD for that purpose. Non-invasive prenatal testing is obviously completely different from pre-implantation genetic diagnosis because what is regulated is not the test, but the circumstances under which a woman can have a termination pregnancy. So they are slightly different.

1:21Skip to 1 minute and 21 secondsSo in relation to PGD the circumstances in which you can test are strictly regulated whereas for abortion you can test for a whole range of things but there are limits upon access to abortion. To they are regulated in rather different ways. I think with non-invasive pre-natal testing, on the whole, it is a very positive thing for women to be able to undergo testing earlier in pregnancy, for it not to have a risk of miscarriage. But of course that leaves women wrestling with what to do with this information. And I don’t think there is any evidence that women are going to be using this in order to have terminations for what you might call trivial reasons.